Eva Richardson: Surface

Vernissage : Thursday, December 1st, 2016 at 6 pmExhibition : December 2 to December 22Artist’s Talk: Friday, December 8 at 6 pm

The McClure Gallery is pleased to feature the recent work of Eva Richardson in the exhibition, Surface. Included are approximately 20 canvases from small to medium format and an equal number of small yet elegant collages. This powerfully quiet gathering of works bears witness to a honed aesthetic sensibility cued to an intimacy at once interior and resonant.

Her earlier work sought to capture, in a minimalist abstract idiom, a sense of the land. Richardson’s more recent work finds its impetus, less from the land than from her collages and photographs, inspired by the “found” sites and objects of her urban environment – the stained pages and covers of old books, rusted metal surfaces or the scarred façade of a crumbling wall, all offering their timeworn marks and traces.

Richardson’s earlier predilection for monochromatic hues and the subtle orchestration of tone continues, the limited palette serving to emphasize a sense of immersion in a field, as if the painting reaches beyond its edges into the viewer’s space. And while the small collages, compositionally edge-to-edge, emphasize the flatness of the picture plane, the recent paintings in contrast capture a greater sense of movement, fluctuation and depth within that plane. What most distinguishes the new body of work from the past is the agitation of surface. A certain emotional intimacy accrues to these paintings – as if they are more interior-scape than landscape, capturing ever more fervently a sense of our embodied selves negotiating the lived world, within and without. Gentle rain (2016) poetically renders a sense of rain falling upon us, within us, as if we are immersed in a weather-drenched atmosphere. Richardson’s marks speak of the fragile notations of the psyche that have not yet found verbal articulation. Therein lies their intimacy, their pull and tug. We scan the painterly fields to linger in their nuances, as we might read and re-read the lines of a poem, worrying it towards meaning.